All about my father

"Fathers are often absent from my movies," Pedro Almodóvar tells Suzie Mackenzie. But in his new film, she discerns a tribute to his father from a director who has himself become something of a patriarch

All about my father

"Fathers are often absent from my movies," Pedro Almodóvar tells Suzie Mackenzie. But in his new film, she discerns a tribute to his father from a director who has himself become something of a patriarch

Friday 16 August 2002 21.19 EDT
First published on Friday 16 August 2002 21.19 EDT

In the summer of, say, 1959, a man, Antonio Almodóvar, left his sleepy little village of Calzada de Calatrava in the province of Ciudad Real, to go and live in the town of Cáceres, a hundred miles north-west, closer and on the road to Madrid. He was just one of millions in Franco's fast-industrialising Spain of the 1950s to abandon the traditional country life in the hope of finding work and opportunity in the city - a rural exodus that, ironically, would lead to the subversion of Franco's beloved family values when so many arrived and found that there was nothing for them. With him, Antonio took his wife, Francisca, his two daughters and his younger son Agustin - his eldest son Pedro having gone ahead some time before to board at a school run by the Salesian fathers.

We don't know much about this man, Antonio, except that he was undoubtedly a good man, that he could barely read or write, that he worked for most of his life as a muleteer, transporting wine, and that 21 years later, in September 1980, the very week that Pedro Almodóvar's first commercial film feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom, would open in Madrid, he would be dead from lung cancer.

As he lay dying, his family, wife, daughters, sons, would transport him back to Calzada - to the same street, same house, very same bed, in which he had been born. "We no longer had a home there but my aunt, his sister, still lived in their mother's house and she had the delicacy to invite us, to finish that cycle." Two or three hours before his death, Antonio called for his eldest son.

"I remember it very well. My father told me: 'Now you are head of the family. Take care of your mother, take care of yourself, and take care of el niño, the baby,' although of course Agustin was now in his 20s but to them he was always the baby." It is a moving scene, you could say a set piece. The dying man bequeathing his legacy to the son he has never understood. The son of whom he used to ask of the mother, "Who does he resemble in our family?" The son who had left home, aged 17, for Madrid, with his father's threat ringing, "You are a minor, I will send the Guardia Civil after you." Though of course he didn't. You didn't invoke the police, not if you had lived through Franco's dictatorship. The son who was, is, a homosexual. Did Antonio know? Probably. Did they ever speak of this? Probably not. Antonio was a man circumscribed by his religion. Homosexuality was to him a sin. But he was also a man of his time. Dictatorship enforces silence but it also forces speech, the betrayal of neighbour by neighbour - perhaps its most terrible enforcement. When Pedro Almodóvar says, "As children we would hear stories of people who had been taken out of their homes to the outskirts of their village and shot. This is what makes civil war so horrible. It goes beyond what armies do to each other, it is wars within villages, personal vengeances...", it is to this enforcement that he alludes. In these circumstances, if no other, far better silence.

And so he became, Almodóvar says, "like my father". "I never intended it, did not think it would happen, but that obligation fell on me in a natural way and it has become true that whenever there is a problem in the family, everyone comes to me. I am to that effect the patriarch. I couldn't avoid it." That is a tough admission coming from a man whose entire career has been devoted to subverting images of power.

He looked after the baby - Agustin is executive producer on all his films since Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988). And he looked after his mother, buying her a house in Madrid and later the home she wanted back in Calzada, "on the same street where she had lived as a child". And it was there that he saw something "very curious", something that had not been demonstrated to him before so starkly. "On that street there still lived the little girls that my mother had grown up with but they were all widows now." The men were dead. "Which leads me to think women are much stronger than men."

Strength and, by implication the word not spoken, weakness. That men are weak, that their weakness derives in part from the very power that they assume either voluntarily or that is put on them by their society, is a repeating theme through Almodóvar's films. The men on his mother's street died of an exhaustion of power. "Educated in the fight against poverty", a fight they would not win, they surrendered. There is something noble and pathetic, both, in that image. Men in Almodóvar's films are frequently defeated by a different sort of emasculation. Javier Bardem, that most physical and physically beautiful of actors, ends up in a wheelchair, literally emasculated, in Live Flesh, the victim of a bullet from his policeman friend's gun, sure, but equally a victim of his own sexual vanity in seducing his friend's wife. And when, in his impotence, he tries to repeat that exercise of power, he loses more than his balls and his legs. In Law Of Desire, Eusebio Poncela, playing Pablo, a film director and a homosexual used to exerting control, is defeated first by his own passion and, finally, when he becomes the object of another's passion. He falls in love too late, or too late for this story.

There is a wonderful line in Law Of Desire spoken by Pablo to his first love Juan: "It is not your fault if you don't love me and it is not my fault if I love you." As spectators we are not asked to sympathise - sympathy is something Almodóvar rarely requires for his characters. He once said, "I have little affection for my characters, for my world, or even for myself." And though maybe now he would retract some of this - in his last four films particularly, I think, he has come to love his characters, and by implication perhaps himself - in a way he is right. Affection is never enough. It may be a start, it is where we all dream of beginning, but it is not a narrative and its end is far from certain. Always, in Almodóvar, there is the warning - don't take a position: it's not your fault and it's not my fault. And a corresponding injunction, follow your dreams. Pursue your fantasy, he says to me, up to the point where it becomes unworkable and then you must let it go. This then is Almodóvar's world, a world of opposing forces: on the one hand restraint, on the other excess, both mediated through his extraordinary sensibility - on the one hand refined, on the other perverse.

He tells me that one of his most potent memories as a child is of his father coming home after a long day's work, sitting solid in his armchair, "like a god", and of the women dancing attendance on him "like slaves". It is an image of unalloyed power and in case I don't get the point, he moves his arms into a position reminiscent of Velázquez's Pope Innocent X. When Almodóvar recounts his father's death he is crying, with restraint, but still weeping. Maybe there is a third element here. For if either I or his interpreter witness his tears, we say nothing - the image of a grown man crying being still something of a taboo.

Almodóvar would understand this as given. In all his work he uses the taboos in culture to undermine them. Which is one reason, I guess, that he opens his latest film, Talk To Her - a lyric masterpiece, finer even than his previous great redemptive films, The Flower Of My Secret and All About My Mother - with a scene of a man crying silently. Two men, strangers, sit in a theatre watching a piece by Pina Bausch. Marco, the good-looking one, played by the wonderful Argentinian actor Darío Grandinetti, is crying - observed with some curiosity by Benigno, the fleshy one, played by the equally extraordinary Javier Cámara. Alter egos, we could infer, of Almodóvar himself. So here we have immediately the two classic dramatic genres. Tragedy, identification, as evidenced by Marco's tears. And comedy, distance, as evidenced by Benigno's increasingly curious glances at the weeping man on his left. Talk To Her, in spite of its title, is a film about silence, and the uses of silence. It is also a film about love. As the plot unfolds, Marco and Benigno, we discover, are in thrall to two women, Lydia and Alicia, who are in comas. As Almodóvar says: "When put like this it sounds almost monstrous." The women cannot speak but their silence elicits in the men a powerful emotional response - in a sense it awakens them. The film also includes a seven-minute sequence of a tragicomic silent movie, The Shrinking Lover.

When asked at a recent Guardian lecture at the NFT why he had indulged in such a dangerous narrative technique, ie to break the narrative thread of the film at midpoint, Almodóvar said this. "I did it to hide something that is going on in the film and something which the spectator should not see..." Silence here, then, becomes a way of protecting both his audience and his character. At the same lecture, Almodóvar was also asked about love. "I wanted to show that for utopian love only one person is necessary, that that passion can move the relationship forward." And when I met him, I asked him about this again. Did he really believe it was true? "I am glad that you asked me about that because as I said it I thought that it was just a way of saying something and perhaps not very clearly. Of course I do not think it is ideal if only one person loves, that is a horrible situation, full of frustrations. But what I meant was that for the eventual miracle, love, to happen, it can be enough where just one wants to communicate, he can communicate. So what I am talking about is the strength of that person." I have to say I was not convinced, or not yet.

There is a line in Talk To Her which will unfailingly make a modern audience laugh. Benigno, who is in love with Alicia, who is in a coma, says to his new friend Marco, who is probably not in love with Lydia, who is also in a coma: "My relationship with Alicia is better than the relationship of many married couples I know." Of course we think, and Marco, thinks, this is ridiculous. What relationship? Alicia cannot speak. But, finally, I think I understand Almodóvar's point about love - "the eventual miracle". What he is describing is the relationship we have with the dead, who cannot speak to us, but with whom we carry on a relationship until our own death. As he says, it is not over. Not while one person loves.

Which is why I think that Talk To Her is a hymn and a homage to Antonio. To the father who didn't speak, or not much, or perhaps only to issue threats to a son whom he did not understand but whom, assuredly, he loved. Almodóvar says this himself. "He loved me more than he did not understand me." To the father who did not live to see his son's success, to see him carry out his dying wishes to provide for the family. Or to see him become, as everyone says of Almodóvar, "the voice of the newly liberated Spain". And to the father who taught him the value of silence. "Fathers are often absent in my movies," Almodóvar has said. "I don't know why." So, to the now absent, yet omni-present father, who was not, it should be said, a god.

In sending Pedro to the seminary in Extremadura, presumably Antonio wanted for his boy the education he never had, and though, Almodóvar says, he was not a political creature - "I don't remember politics ever being talked about in our home" - perhaps he had some sense that the future would be different or anyway that his strange kid was not going to make a life as a muleteer. He must have thought, wrongly as it turned out, the priests would look after him.

Religion was a staple of their life. It was community. It was celebration. Holy Week was all music and flowers and carrying aloft the Virgin. His parents, Almodóvar says, were devoted Catholics, "but in a peculiarly Spanish way. Spanish people take religion as part of their daily life; that doesn't mean that they don't take it seriously, my mother took her saints very seriously. But not mass. The Pope has said the Spanish are a nation of idolators. Well, we are, fortunately, and this is good because it's human." This early part of his education he doesn't remember as oppressive. "I don't remember it as being concerned with sin and guilt. In Spain, God as an entity disappeared and what was left was a brotherhood, socialising, parties. Religion helps when you understand it like this, when you don't try to look desperately for some superior who anyway you don't find."

At the seminary it was all sin and guilt. "All about original sin, which I have to say is very original. But this is an awful thing to do to boys of nine or 10, to tell them you are guilty just for being born. To engrave in their minds the idea of sin and punishment. Well, luckily I was able to forget that. But psychologically it was very tough." It was also more than this. Eighty per cent of the little boys, Almodóvar says, were sexually abused. "About 80% of us, yes." He remembers, he says, the dark, the long corridors, and running away - not that there was anywhere to run to. For years he was terrified of darkness. "I remember the priests and how they took my hands and made me kiss them because this is a form of greeting. And I refused and they forced me to." Later at his secondary school with the Franciscans, he says it was better. "But that was because I was older and more able to defend myself." His main refuge was in music, he had a lovely voice, "what they call a white voice", and he sang in the choir. In his films, too, music is often used as a refuge, a way out of a dominant emotion - out of darkness into light.

It is essential to remember that what he is relating here happened to a child. Later, as an adolescent, he could discover his sexuality for himself. And Franco was still alive. In 1970, roughly a decade after the events Almodóvar is describing, Franco passed an act giving police the power to arrest homosexuals "because of the threat posed to society". As Almodóvar says, "It was not a good time to have a sexual orientation that was different." He didn't know he was homosexual at this point: "There were some homosexual experiences in the village when I was about 13, 14, but these were with bisexuals so I don't think I knew then, I think I accepted it when I was about 18. In Madrid I was always able to live in a natural way. I was lucky."

That the experience at the seminary destroyed any belief in a God is certain, and it must also have destroyed any faith he had in the exercise of power, in all those "fathers". Maybe at this point, also, he blamed Antonio for his failure to protect him - not from homosexuality, this as he says "is innate" - but from the hands of the abusers. Abuse is, as we are beginning to be aware, rampant. So when Almodóvar speaks here, he is not speaking just for himself.

"Abuse is an old problem which they, the church, don't want to face, but they are having to face it now. It is impossible to contain, it will explode. It is a great problem because the Catholic church does not recognise homosexuality and yet it is probably its greatest promoter. They push celibacy on these young men who want to be priests and naturally the ones who gravitate to the priesthood are the ones who are less attracted to women. Maybe there will be some among them who are asexual. But most of them don't like women because they like men. So what you have is a bit like hunger and being put in a place full of food. Giving the priests the chance to marry is the only way to resolve this problem." He adds: "Also I think that women should be consecrated, as has been done in the Anglican church. This, too, would be a solution to the problem."

It is often assumed that Law Of Desire (1987) is his most autobiographical film - featuring as it does a gay, cocaine-addicted film director, though Almodóvar never was a coke addict and now takes no drugs at all. But it is in The Flower Of My Secret (1995), a film about a woman novelist, who is stuck in a rut and a publishing contract, that the narrative tone of his films changes. Up to 1988, and even after the huge international success of Women On The Verge..., his death as auteur/director of movies had been widely predicted - not least in Spain. His style and most especially his tone - because narrative, as he has said, is tone - was thought to be on the point of exhausting itself. In All About My Mother, his biggest success to date, he would even have one of his characters pinpoint this. "I was always excessive and now I am very tired," Lola the transsexual says to his/her former lover just before he dies. Death from exhaustion, or the exhaustion of power, symbolised, of course, in Spain's great national pastime, the bullfight. But Almodóvar, like the bull in Talk To Her, has survived.

The change in tone was not a commercial consideration - between 1988 and 1993, seven of the top 13 Spanish film exports to the US had been directed by Almodóvar. "Growing-up" is how he describes it. "That's something that happens to you in your 40s." Now the films, which had always been a mix of realism and stylisation, excessive, melodramatic, given to wild swings of humour, centring on strong female characters and popularising the Spanish subculture of transsexuals, transvestites, as if to blast away the old national stereotypes of dancers and Gypsies, become increasingly linear, less dedicated to aesthetic sensation. What he kept, specifically after 1995, was his subversive use of melodrama, traditionally a conservative genre focusing on the domestic, but in his hands a collision of realism and artifice that makes you laugh and cry.

With each successive film of the past seven years, Talk To Her being the fourth, he has tightened his emotional control and become more gentle in his vision. Where Kika (1993) ends with a sea of bodies and Kika herself driving into the distance with an unknown hitchhiker, Live Flesh ends with a birth, one sort of miracle, and All About My Mother with the miraculous recovery of a child with HIV.

I asked him at one point about secrets. Every artist needs to have secrets, he told me. "Secrets enrich your life, they can add riches to your work." But secrets also, he says, can become asphyxiating. "For example, if you take sexuality, or homosexuality, you don't have an obligation to talk about this but you have an obligation to face it yourself, otherwise you are condemned to a very painful life. That is something people should know." In fact, I wasn't thinking about sexuality. I was thinking about Antonio and about his unusually talented child and how the father must have feared for him. And about the boy growing up in a claustrophobic village: "All I ever dreamed about was getting out of there. I knew that somewhere there was a place for me." All this the father must have known, too, and if it hurt he didn't say. What did Pedro say at another point? "He loved me more than he wanted to control me." Maybe only this is true love. And, of course, the son found his way out, in a way. "Though everything in life is relative, unfortunately," he says.

All children have secrets, he says, they fantasise, and children alone have the ability to make these real. It becomes more difficult later. He surpassed his father and he became the father, though perhaps not the father that in his childhood fantasy he expected to be. But let that go. There are times, he says, when he has longed to be a biological father: "I envy people with children, of course. I would love that. But I am afraid of the life that I could give them. Children need someone to love as well as someone to love them."

The more I think about him, the more I think he is his father's son - Francisca's son too, of course, but not for this moment, not for this film. A bit shy, diffident, a big no-sayer, not at all lazy, and above all honest. I don't think there is one lie in any of his films. You have to say, that is some legacy from father to son. As Talk To Her is some tribute from son to father